The re-signing was not part of the trade. Blake obviously entertained offers elsewhere, and there was no report of a higher offer. So your point seems to be that, as part of the trade, the Dodgers got the privilege of paying Blake more than anyone else would for the next three years. Seems to me that they had that privilege even without making the trade.

Yes, that would be my point. That I win doesn’t mean you lose. Heck, that I lose doesn’t even necessarily mean you win.

Nor does it preclude other teams from losing – even the Cubs. They’ve struggled to fill the hole DeRosa left, and may never see anything from Stevens or the others we sent over. Further, DeRosa now plays on the one team most threatening to the Cubs, the 0.5 gb Cardinals.

To say either way, that a trade must necessarily have a winner and a loser or must necessarily have two winners, is incorrect. It can happen either way. In fact, it could even have two losers.

The complaint that every writer “always try to find a ‘winner’ and a ‘loser’ in a trade” is valid. Here, though, I don’t think it is for two reasons.

First, solely from the Indians perspective, they scored a zero-sum win by most scouts assessments (or so it seems initially and casually) by flipping DeRosa.

Second, it is possible (but very complicated) to judge whether a trade was one of equal value for both sides without waiting for the results to come in years later. Every player in an organization has some value to that organization, and if more value comes in than goes out, that must be a win. That’s what the writer was trying to show. The two higher end pitching prospects should have been considered of higher value to the Cards than the DeRosa return. Whether or not that’s the case, I don’t think I could say. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t an objective truth.